Japanese low budget underground film maker Kazuo "Gaira" Komizu is the man
behind the hyper sleazy Guts/Entrails of a Virgin trilogy from the late
eighties. Those films are filled with (almost) hard core level sex scenes,
nudity, some very bizarre goings on, some ultra gore plus monster semen.
Yes, you read right, those three films are perfect examples for those who
think they've seen it all in the genre of low budget horror cinema. "Gaira"
has also written a film called Female Market (Yasuaki Uegaki, 1986), one of
the most deeply disturbing and sadistic rape related films I've witnessed.
His lightest film may very well be this, Living Dead in Tokyo Bay aka Battle
Girl (1992) which stars the female wrestler Cutey Suzuki, and she is, as her
name suggest, quite cute.

The film is about some meteorites that crash into the Earth, bringing some
kind of a zombie virus here turning people into flesh eating monsters very
similar with the Romero ones. There's also an evil general that tries to
take the world domination by using the virus as his weapon. One brave lady
(Suzuki) is a daughter of a military officer and she is sent to fight the
evil general as well as the zombies, dressed in a cool black leather uniform
with incredible powers, martial art talents and ability to use various
weapons! Unfortunately I only saw the unsubtitled Japanese version so any
possible noteworthy things or bits of social commentary in the dialogue went
sadly beyond me, but still I have plenty of positive things to say about the
film.

Craig Ledbetter wrote in the ATC magazine, having just seen the English
subtitled version, that the film indeed is a metaphor of the Japanese
society and its history as Japan, for example, exploited the World War II by
making horrible human experiments to the Chinese in the name of science, a
truly horrific and disturbingly sad part of the world history depicted
detailedly in a film Men Behind the Sun (1987) by Taiwanese/Chinese film
maker Tun Fei Mous. This kind of low low budget zombie romp having such
important message and metaphoras is a very great thing and it naturally
raises this film to higher level.

The film is also very enjoyable as pure zombie horror with some
inventiveness to fill the gaps caused by the lack of money. The film is not
too long and thus never boring (especially if I had managed to understand
the dialogue parts, too) and there are plenty of action and mayhem to keep
things interesting alongside the calmer parts. The visual look is pretty
dark which is nice, and the effects consist of much colored and naturally
over-the-top "gore", rather well done zombie masks and zombies plus not so
convincing but still good enough for a film like this meteorite scenes at
the very beginning.

The film is naturally pretty close to George Romero's zombie classic Dawn of
the Dead (1978) with many almost identical scenes. One poor soldier can't
take it anymore and kills himself. A group of gun selling punks arrive to
fight the ghouls, just like the Tom Savini led motorbike gang at the end of
Romero's film. Still I don't find these things irritating or exploiting at
all since "Gaira" knows what's he doing with his limited budget and always
adds his own ideas and ambitions to the soup, and since the problems in the
society haven't vanished since the Dawn's days, why should the fight
stop?

This is, in fact, among the more enjoyable and interesting low budget action
horrors I've seen from Japan and everything the director couldn't buy or pay
for, he created otherwise with creativity and that's why the film looks so
good and heart warming for those who understand the sub genre.
7/10

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